Category: visual

Philip Kennicott: “History tells us these things are all too common, even as modern media saturation makes it seem somehow unprecedented. Flip through the pages of any tourist guide to an old castle, church or palace, and there is often a litany of fires, floods, revolutions and occasional bouts of revolution and iconoclasm.” – Washington Post

The St. Petersburg museum will add a 20,000-square-foot extension to house educational and community events and elaborate digital facilities, including virtual reality tech along the lines being used in its current “Dalí and Magritte” exhibition. – ARTnews

A young shoe salesman from Delaware, who now has no idea what he was thinking at the time, did the deed at an Ugly Sweater party at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia in 2017. He was tried last week under an art theft law that could have sent him to prison for decades. Expert testimony got so strange that the jury hopelessly deadlocked. Jeremy Roebuck explains how it all went down. – The Philadelphia Inquirer

So far, it appears that almost all of the major art objects and relics in the cathedral were saved, thanks to a human chain formed during the fire; most will be taken to the Louvre for conservation and storage.  Amazingly, neither the stained-glass windows nor the grand organ appear to have suffered severe damage. – Smithsonian Magazine

In 2010, Andrew Tallon, an art professor at Vassar, took a Leica ScanStation C10 to Notre-Dame and, with the assistance of Columbia’s Paul Blaer, began to painstakingly scan every piece of the structure, inside and out. They mounted the Leica on a tripod, put up markers throughout the space, and set the machine to work. Over five days, they positioned the scanner again and again—50 times in all—to create an unmatched record of the reality of one of the world’s most awe-inspiring buildings, represented as a series of points in space.  – The Atlantic

Today, of course, the contents of Lot 664 are worth far more than that: The picture has since sold once for $127.5 million and again, in a record-setting auction at Christie’s, for close to half a billion dollars. It has been held up as the “male Mona Lisa” and the “Holy Grail of old-master paintings” and derided by this magazine’s art critic, Jerry Saltz, as a “two-dimensional ersatz dashboard Jesus.”  – New York Magazine

The Palace of Westminster is a crumbling fire trap, warn MPs and building maintenance professionals, and fire patrols on the premises round the clock are the only reason the place hasn’t burned up already. – The Guardian

As President Macron said, “The worst has been avoided” — meaning that, at least, the walls and the twin front towers didn’t collapse and there were no deaths. Here’s the current info. – The New York Times

Rachel Donadio: “I was standing in a hushed, pained throng along the Quai d’Orléans of the Ile Saint-Louis facing the back of the basilica, and when I watched the spire fall, I gasped and choked back tears. In this, I was not alone.” – The Atlantic